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Sean Williams at Harper’s Magazine:

One morning last November, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located some six hundred miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands, and its people share a culture, linguistic links, and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbors. But thanks mostly to European colonizers, who drew the borders, Bougainville is the farthest-flung province of Papua New Guinea, whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvilleans often call “redskins,” betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.

I say partly because if not for the islands’ having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea—which remarkably they won—and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville’s independence by 2027, the story I am about to tell would likely never have happened, nor would it have piqued the interest of an American magazine.

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Paul Barbato in Newsweek:

I grew up on the north side of Chicago in a pretty diverse school district that had students with backgrounds hailing from all corners of the world. I remember hearing a classmate speak to his mom in Polish when she picked him up. Another classmate brought Pakistani Biryani his mom made for lunch. It was a quite riveting experience at a young age to have exposure to such a vibrant student body. Everyone had a story, a history, a culture, yet we were all American kids raised on a steady diet of pop culture and pop tarts. Nonetheless, these kids’ subtle yet unique cultural undertones first sparked my curiosity to know more about the world.

This curiosity would eventually evolve into me digging deeper into my own roots. From a young age I was always reminded of my half-Korean heritage; I even have pictures of me as a baby on my 100th day celebration wearing a Han-bok. Yet, my Korean heritage was usually more of a “lingering backdrop” to my identity, as it wasn’t pressured on me by my parents to “be more Korean” growing up.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by this year’s Nobel prize has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs¹. The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures, identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from zebrafish to mammals.

The finding, published 17 October in Cell, unravels the previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — would be sufficient to ensure fertilisation, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door anymore,” she says. “It’s more complicated.”

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Walking to School

Autumn, and I, not an especially
triumphant boy, descended in triumph
from Hillside down Evergreen where torches
of maple – yellows, oranges, fierce reds –
were lit for me. When the rains came, heavy
leaves fell, some gold like the cobblestones
of heaven, and I picked my way to school
from one to the next.  Home owners who didn’t
quickly sweep, owned a sidewalk abstract etched
by leaf. Brown November. Homeward in
the early dark, breathing the acid smell
of burning leaves, wanting to grow up to be
one of the men who leaned on iron-tined
rakes to tend the smoking pyres.

by Nils Peterson

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Stan Carey at Sentence First:

In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are strikingly, deliberately few:

All my life I have written, and all my life I have (without conscious decision) avoided reading how-to-write things. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary and Follett’s and Fowler’s manuals of usage are my entire arsenal of tools.*

* Note (1989). I use Fowler and Follett rarely now, finding them authoritarian. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, corrected and supplemented by Miller and Swift’s Words and Women, are my road-atlas to English, and have never led me astray. A secondhand copy of the smallprint Oxford English Dictionary in volumes has been an infinite source of learning and pleasure, but the Shorter Oxford is still good for a quick fix.

The attractive, two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was the first big dictionary I owned, followed over the years by comparable editions from American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, Macmillan, and Chambers (this one slang). I still consult them all, as well as more portable editions (and a bunch of online dictionaries); they form a lexically dense archipelago on the shelf.

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Beth Mole in Ars Technica:

The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it’s been that way for well over a decade.

The association’s guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don’t have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: “Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed,” the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.

But, of course, the 2012 guidelines are outdated—the latest ones go further.

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Luke Glowacki in Evolution and Human Behavior:

The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our evolutionary ancestors were peaceful or warlike has important implications for modern human nature. One side argues that warfare has a deep evolutionary history, possible dating to the last common ancestor of bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, while the other views war as a recent innovation, primarily developing with the rise of sedentism and agriculture. I show that although both positions have some support warranting consideration, each sometimes ignores uncertainties about human evolution and simplifies the complex reality of hunter-gatherer worlds. Many characterizations about the evolution of war are partial truths. Bonobos and chimpanzees provide important insights relevant for understanding the origins of war, but using either species as a model for human evolution has important limitations. Hunter-gatherers often had war, but like humans everywhere, our ancestors likely had a range of relationships depending on the context, including cooperative intergroup affiliation. Taken together, the evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy.

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God Says Yes To me

I asked God if it was ok to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked if it was ok to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even ok if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

by Kaylin Haught
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

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James Campbell at The New Criterion:

I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he was not the desolate figure who moves through the dismal second half of A Cool Queer Life. We sat for an entire afternoon on our first encounter in his house on Cole Street, me with his cat on my lap (immortalized in the poem “In Trust” from his last book, Boss Cupid) and a bottle of cheap white wine between us. (It had to be cheap: refined in so many ways, Gunn loved vulgarity in drink and music. “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men,” he wrote in The Passages of Joy.) It counts as one of the most memorable conversations of my life. At intervals, he would rise to take down a book from the shelf, to read a poem in order to illustrate or affirm an enthusiasm. I remember him saying that he had a direct entry into poetry. Where he encountered barriers, he usually knew how to overcome them. He believed that Boss Cupid would be his final book, but his illuminating introduction to a short selection from Ezra Pound made in 2000 proves that his “writing life” continued in other forms.

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Tara Isabella Burton at The Hedgehog Review:

But if there was little obvious distinction between “religious” pilgrims and “regular” travelers, it was partly because the discourse of contemporary travel is so often geared toward the same ends as pilgrimage proper: a journey that results in the transformation, and ideally purification, of the searching self. This is the goal underlying, for example, travel-as-transformation narratives like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, an account of the author’s solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce-and-self-actualization memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Travel, at least the kind of travel so often coded as “real” or “authentic” (as opposed to, say, the family resort vacation, the Instagram trip, or the perfunctory list-ticking of the much-derided “tourist”), is already treated as a kind of secular pilgrimage in which we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home. Only when we are away from our daily routines, this ideology implies, from our bosses and spouses and children, when we are challenged by language barrier or public transit mishap or unexpected romantic chemistry, can we come to know who we really are.

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Herman Melville (1851) from Harper’s Magazine:

THE Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travelers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular’ accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Human life expectancy dramatically increased last century. Compared to babies born in 1900, those born at the turn of the 21st century could live, on average, three decades longer—with many living to celebrate their 100th birthdays. In other words, for much of the century, each passing year added something like three months to a person’s potential time on Earth. To optimists in the longevity field, the rapid rise in life expectancy will likely continue at a steady, if not accelerated, pace.

Others have a more pessimistic view. In their predictions, humans will hit a natural ceiling, with the average person in developed countries living to an age far less than 100. A new study adds to the debate with analysis of data from 1990 to 2019. After examining life expectancy from eight countries with the longest living populations, plus those from Hong Kong and the US, the team reached a troubling conclusion: Despite innovations in healthcare, the increase in overall life expectancy is slowing down.

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Emilie Owens in Psyche:

It is midday on a Friday, and I am in a room with about a dozen teenagers at an international school in Oslo, Norway. We are talking about how and why they use TikTok, the digital video-sharing application. The prevailing mood is laid-back: though I am technically a media researcher, and they are technically my research participants, this group of 16- and 17-year-olds are joking around with each other and with me as we chat about the role of TikTok in their everyday lives. It’s a beautiful day – warm and summery – and everyone, including me, is in a fun weekend mood.

‘I dunno, it’s kind of hard to describe what I see on my For You page,’ says one of my participants.

‘Yeah, it’s like…’ another of them pauses, looking for the right word. ‘It’s just mostly brain rot, you know?’

I do not know. This is my first introduction to the term ‘brain rot’. Perplexed, I ask them what it means.

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Manuel Ansede in El País:

Terence Tao snorts and waves his hands dismissively when he hears that he is the most intelligent human being on the planet, according to a number of online rankings, including a recent one conducted by the BBC. He is, however, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. When he was two, his parents saw him teaching another five-year-old boy to count.

“That’s what my parents told me. I don’t remember this myself. They asked me who I had learned it from. I said, from Sesame Street,” says Tao, 49, who was born in the Australian city of Adelaide. When he was 11, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At 12, he took home silver. At 13, gold. At 21, he received his doctorate from Princeton University. At 24, he was already a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. And at 31, he won the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in his discipline.

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Seraj Assi in Jacobin:

The Palestinian Nakba produced, alongside death and displacement, a generation of writers who came of age in its aftermath. The moment seemed to demand a funereal tone from artists who had witnessed the tragedy. For them, a version of Theodor Adorno’s maxim, that to “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” rung true. Few broke the taboo.

Born in Haifa 102 years ago, Emile Habibi was an exception. His 1974 masterpiece, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, dared to approach the Nakba with irreverence; the Palestinian catastrophe was for him a tragicomic saga, which he depicted with a firm sense of irony. “Had it not been for your Shoah . . . then the calamity that remains the lot of my people would not have been possible,” he wrote in a 1986 article.

Habibi grew up under the system of military rule imposed on Palestinians within the newly established state of Israel between 1948 and 1966 and brought to an end in 1967, when Israel launched the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. This regime was, for Palestinians, a segregationist one: land appropriation and restrictions on movement as well as political and intellectual expression were its defining features.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

It’s not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with “consciousness” and more to do with “sentience” — the ability to perceive feelings and sensations. Philosopher Jonathan Birch has embarked on a careful study of the meaning of sentience and how it can be identified in different kinds of organisms, as he discusses in his new open-access book The Edge of Sentience. This is an example of a question at the boundary of philosophy and biology with potentially important implications for real-world policies.

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David Mason at The Hudson Review:

For Christmas lunch, 1937, Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted John Maynard Keynes and his wife, Lydia. Imagine the talk, which no doubt ranged widely, including gossip about younger writers like W. H. Auden, the recipient that autumn of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry from George VI himself. A lot of people were saying it: Auden was the man to watch. At only thirty, he was already regarded as England’s leading poet, head of a squadron of younger writers, including Louis MacNeice, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. According to Nicholas Jenkins’ important new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England,^[1] Keynes was “offended by Auden’s standards of personal hygiene,” telling the Woolfs that the poet was “very dirty but a genius.”
 
We rarely associate Auden’s poetry with the slovenly and remember his tidy stanzas too often as something cold and oblique, iceberg verse. His early work has been published as The English Auden (1977), appearing to emphasize the national (even nationalist) poet, a thoroughly domesticated animal. As Jenkins argues in over 500 densely written pages, there is a lot of truth in this image.

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